Look if someone's having a bad time, it don't cost much to throw em a bone. Like sure, that last attack killed them a round early because everyone has had a moment to feel proud today but you. Or like the spellcaster who is feeling a bit shitty because every monster has saved against their spells by some fluke today.
Like if they aren't having fun, what am I doing here?
Video games do this shit all the time. Famously the first GoW gave new players a small boost in multiplayer. It led to a community and better engagement in the long run because people had more fun. BG3 has that goofy 'karmic dice' system, which is on by default. Fire emblem lies. etc etc
the problem with flubbing is the dishonesty and unilateralness. You can play a different system that doesn't create the situation your players don't like so easily.
Or honestly just import Fate points and "succeed at a cost" into dnd. The dice system still sucks but that would help tremendously.
I prefer games with player-facing rolls. I also prefer emergent gameplay so I'll roll on random charts, but that's it. Stakes are stakes, and character death should be something in the forefront of player minds imo
Well when you arn't sure if the encounter is balanced from the beginning and the dragons breath would tpk in one hit its kinda better to turn the cone into a line and half the damage so you only have one player down.
Yeah, I'm not big on fudging rolls, but that's one thing I will do. In my last campaign, I had statted up the first real villain for my players to fight, and they knocked him out in one punch. I would have made him one level higher, but then his own attacks would have been strong enough to one-shot some of the players. Level 1 woes.
Yeah, I learned that too. I had come up with a villain later on who had a very defense/counterattack focused stationary fighting style combined with sundering armor, and I thought I could make him a big threat, but then he ended up completely flopping because there just wasn't support for building that style and making it strong. Now I'm playing looser, and stealing lair actions from D&D (minus the lair part most of the time) to make my loner villains work.
Legit, I don't fudge rolls because it's not fun for me.
If a roll would fuck up the session/adventure/campaign, I just straight up tell the players I'm making a call and override the results. It doesn't happen often, and it's really only when rng just screws things, like when you get multiple nat 1s in a session, way out of line with what makes sense without some kind of gymnastics to explain things in game.
I think the difference is being transparent about it. This is saying "I know that shouldn't hit, but I'm saying it hits anyways." Traditional fudging is "That... hits, yeah, totally."
So that my players see me roll the dice. As long as they believe the illusion, the roll is real to them, and so their experience is meaningful and memorable; at the end of the day, that's what matters most to me as a DM.
I make a point not to kill my players unless they make a habit of doing dumb shit, or it's "almost" happened a couple times already.
Especially if I get several good rolls or they get several bad rolls in a row.
The game should be fun for everyone, and if even one player goes home upset with the session I will have considered my night a failure as DM.
Not that I consider it a failing or even "bad" if someone else kills off their players. Everyone has different expectations from games and I've seen fantastic role playing of deaths before.
One player ripped their heart out of their own chest, chugging a health potion to stay alive long enough to place it in their spouse who had just died died, and another player healed the spouse.
They asked me if I would allow that and honestly it sounded cool enough that I was all for it.
i'm kind of torn on this. because, if the dice are the be-all-end-all, why have a GM at the table? i'd wager the vast majority of GMs tune difficulty and pacing on the fly without realizing it, even if it's just "i'm gonna skip this last encounter because we're already a half hour over and i have work tomorrow" or even just "wow everyone is bored as shit right now, we outta pick up the pace" but on the other hand, I have seen a fee bad rolls in a low-stakes encounter spiral into a character dying, and it was cool as shit. that's part of the magic of rpgs- no do-overs or back to the title screen, instead the rest of the party (or the whole party if the player rolls a new character) needs to contend and deal with being down a person. in our case we had to drag a corpse across a continent to get to a cleric powerful enough to bring him back, and in doing so accidentally let the big bad into the otherwise secure city limits. we would have completely missed out on all of that if those dice were fudged. i guess it all down to context- fudging to prevent the GM railroad from being derailed robs you of experiences, but we also have GMs at the table for a reason, and i'm ok with them using fudging when they feel it's warranted so long as they're not abusing it to the point where there's no risk to anything. at the end of the day, if we're all having fun, i trust the GM with whatever they're doing, and if we're not, fudging is probably a symptom of whatever actually is the issue
What I found in the TTRPG community is that a lot of GM's like to hear themselves talk. They write these huge paragraphs of sentences stringed together jumping from one topic to the next.
You can even notice this in the way the D&D books are written. Instead of using easy to navigate bullet points, it is just walls of text one after the other. Trying to find some specific knowledge in that is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
i've been writing a pretty big RPG module for years now and feel the same. in the beginning i was all about the prose and beauty of the written document. now, i'm just like "bullet points. go."
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